Week 6

Welcome back everyone!

This week has been very exciting for me because I got to spend a lot of time working in the lab with my on-site advisor and his lab assistants.

In one of my previous posts, I stated my anxiety over working with undergraduate seniors and being intimidated by them; however, I found out that working with them can actually be fun and helps alleviate the boring nature of research (turns out research is eighty percent cleaning and preparation and not nearly as exciting as what you see in movies). One of the lab assistants, Miguel, talked to me about college life and was the reason why I decided to apply to Arizona State University out of nowhere. He also gave me a tour of the dorms and campus after I was done for the day at the lab. Brandon, another lab assistant I worked with, talked to me about the fun side of student life at ASU and I now know which clubs to join for parties. My project at the lab is meant to be solo and the lab assistants are there to supervise my project. I learned that working solo on a research project can become boring when most of the project requires you to wait before you can move on (not like Ms. Vo’s labs where everything was fast paced and on a time crunch). If I’m going to pursue another research project in the future, I would probably do a group research rather than doing it solo.

My previous experiences with Ms. Vo’s labs did a good job at preparing me for working at ASU’s labs, but there were things that I had to learn. One, I had to learn how to work with an open flame to sterilize my materials which was fun until I accidentally tipped over the bunsen burner (which isn’t as solid as it looks) and suddenly had flames bursting at my chest. I also learned how to operate an autoclave. An autoclave is used to sterilize materials for use and biohazard waste before it is thrown out. It’s basically a giant steamer that looks like a massive oven that is inserted into the wall. I had to put on a lot of protective wear while working with the autoclave. The last skill I learned was how to use a fume hood properly. At BASIS, we used fume hoods to store waste from experiments, but they are supposed to be aseptic (free of contamination from microorganisms) environments for experiments.

Overall, working at the lab has been a fun experience so far and I will see you all next week.

- CJ Pimentel